Hello and welcome to Ben-Cuba Radio episode 306. So we're back here with me Tom doing

another mini solo show. The reason that I wanted to do this show today is just to build a little bit on what we've been talking about in the last couple of episodes on personal development because I've actually been doing something for my personal development that I hadn't really mentioned yet on the show.

I tried to get it in on the first episode that I did, but unfortunately it was going to take it

well over 20 minutes, so I thought that it would be better off to just kind of break these down and I wanted to talk to you about this today.

So the thing that I've been doing to improve myself, I suppose I would say this year, is to do with something that I actually suffer with every year.

So some of you may, some of you may not have heard of something called Seasonally Affected Disorder.

It's usually sort of shortened down to

S. A. D. or sad, which is quite fitting because it's basically a seasonal form of

depression. S. A. DAD hits about 1 in 15 people in the UK, I believe,

especially during the month of like September to April,

and it kind of gets really bad in like December in January for most people.

The average age of the person that gets SAD something like 28, I started suffering with it

myself around age 22, so I was an early bloomer let's say but this isn't

all here to sort of feel sympathy for me I want to make this positive and I want to

actually say what I've been doing about it. So SAD kind of leads me to have basically a clinical moderate depression. So depression can be measured in a few different ways and one of them is the Beck inventory.

So the Beck inventory rates you from 1 to about 45 I believe. The lower the number the better,

for one of the better better way putting it.

So last year in January 2017 I did a self test at the Becker inventory you can do it yourself you can find it online

and I'm measuring up at a 23 which puts me

sort of at the bottom end of moderate depression. I had all of the usual characteristics

low mood, low motivation, very little appetite, didn't really feel like talking

to anybody, a little bit of anxiety that goes alongside of it as well.

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